Kareem’s EyeMine expertise
Monday, December 18th, 2023
As part of celebrating five years of our EyeMine interface in 2024, we’d love to give a big shout out to Kareem, AKA SaturdayHS, an experienced gamer, streamer, eye-gaze user and EyeMine expert who’s been working closely with our developers to help keep the feature set fresh.
Kareem has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and discovered EyeMine when he started to use eye control for his gaming. Since then his tech insight has been invaluable in improving our free eye-control optimised software that enables Minecraft to be played without a keyboard or a mouse.
“I was playing games and controlling my PC with speech recognition before I tried EyeMine,” said Kareem. “It was difficult to play most games but I made it work. Now I control my computer using the eye tracker in combination with other programs.”
We asked Kareem what, in his opinion, were the most useful EyeMine features. “It’s great to be able to customize the EyeMine keyboard to your liking to play Minecraft, or even other games that have customizable keys. Other useful features include utilizing night vision and toggle use. Night vision is great in the caves as it get a bit too dark, and toggling use is also useful since it makes things in modded Minecraft that much easier.”
Kareem feedback and suggestions for additional features have been invaluable. “If I find something that’s possible but difficult to do with EyeMine, like particular key combinations for example, I liaise with the developers who either add the extra functionality or guide me through how to implement it.”
He recommends taking time to get to know EyeMine and Minecraft if you’re starting out: “I suggest starting in Creative mode to get a feel of the game. Although I enjoy playing in Survival mode, I find Creative mode useful to get an idea how a particular build would look or what resources I’d need to build something.”
Kareem’s always willing to share the experience he’s gained over the eight years he’s been streaming. He plays and streams Minecraft pretty much exclusively, although he’s transitioning his content to do more things related to Marvel and movies on a secondary YouTube channel.
Watching him play reveals a real sense of gaming passion and purpose. “Gaming is important to me because it gives me an escape from reality,” he says. “It gives me an opportunity to explore the world, build contraptions, play with certain mods that add things like casting spells or even nuclear physics.”
We’d like to thank Kareem again for his pivotal role in improving EyeMine. He’s an integral part of our team of EyeMine experts whose thoughtful suggestions benefit players across the world, and we truly appreciate their help. As a charity we’re learning all the time about the small details that make gaming as accessible as possible for people with physical disabilities, and without the support of players like Kareem, that knowledge would far less informed.